Travis Day on Paragon 2.0 and Ladders

Posted By: September 14, 2013

Travis Day hopped into a couple of forum threads today to answer questions about the Paragon 2.0 system. He mostly restates what we already knew, but this bit about how ladders will function with paragon is newish.

I bet you start ladder with paragon 0 and your ladder exp is added to your non-ladder exp in the event of a reset. That’s my hope at least. Travis Day: That is currently the plan. Paragon experience will be account but will also be broken out by game play mode. Players who play in Hardcore will have a separate hardcore paragon level from their non hardcore characters.

When a season ends all of the paragon experience you have earned will be rolled into the appropriate pool of paragon experience for the account and you will be able to start at 0 again in the new season.

This is all still a work in progress and subject to change but that is what we are currently intending.

Click through for another longer explanation of the basic paragon 2.0 system, though it’s not new info if you were following the details from Gamescom.

Paragon levels are account bound, they are also segregated between HC and non HC characters. This means you will have a paragon level associated with HC characters that can not be increased by playing non HC characters. We didn’t want players to feel like the “right way” to level their HC paragon was outside of HC.

The intent of account wide paragon is to reward the player, not the specific character. Paragon experience and levels are fun to earn, but they currently have the draw back of making people feel tied to a specific character. We want to let players play the game however they want when possible and this was one case where we felt the right thing to do was let you play any character you want and have them all work towards the same rewards.

In the case of spending paragon points, if you are paragon level 50, you will have 50 points to spend in the assorted categories. Each character that has access to this pool of points will get to allocate them for that character. So your barbs 50 points can be allocated differently than your wizards 50 points.

Lastly yes paragon levels do not have a cap. The amount of experience required to gain a paragon level increases every time you earn a new one so progress becomes slower the higher you are, but if you theoretically played all day every day for the next 10 years you would still be earning paragon experience.

I still have 2 main questions: 1) When does a new character get access to paragon points (100% of them level 1? Some % coming in every ten levels? 100% at once at max level?) and 2) Is there nothing tied to an individual character anymore?

Point #1 is mostly an issue for Hardcore, where rerolling isn’t something you did once last May and never since. Point #2 though seems relevant to everyone. If all we ever get are Paragon Points from our Paragon Levels, then every max level character is identical, assuming the same Account Sharagon level. And that seems weird, to me. If you’ve played a thousand hours with your Wizard and you’re at Sharagon Level 156, and I’ve played a thousand hours of Monk and DH and I’m at Sharagon Level 156, and I make a new Wizard… I don’t think that character should instantly be identical to your 1000+ hour Wizard. Nor should your brand new DH/Monk be equal to mine. There should be some bonuses earned by individual chars, not just all from the Sharagon Account. Right?

Also, imagine this system long term: It’s 2015, your account is at Sharagon Level 347, and you roll a new Witch Doctor. They get to level 70 and you stack on all 347 Paragon points and your character is instantly awesome, and far stronger than someone else’s WD who has played hundreds of hours but has only Sharagon Level 114 for their account. But then that WD never changes at all. You might need to play 50 hours to ding to the next Sharagon level. So all that time your new max level WD would never gain any kind of level up, any new points, any sign of progress or change whatsoever? That sounds really boring.

I think it’s a good idea that Sharagon points go straight to your fresh lvl70 char, but I don’t think it will make them powerful. Just think about the game now. The only thing that will make a character powerful is the gear.

So you may powerlevel a char to 70, then spend 500 sharagon points on him, but you’ll still bit the dust on Inferno MP10 (the ultimate goal which matters) in your peasant gear.

I still do not understand most of this. If I have 5 characters all with different paragons then do they all add together? Also if I got 50 paragon points, does each character get 50 or is it only the 50 to spend to in the total characters you have? If that’s the case that’s kind of annoying if each time you play a class you have to dump all the points back in forth between them.

You have a plvl 100, a plvl 50 and a plvl 20. After the patch, they all become simply level 60, and your account becomes plvl 130 (for example). You now have 130 points you can put into Str on your first character, 130 points you can put into Crit Chance on your second character and 130 points you can put into anything on your third character.

I’d strongly encourage anyone confused by Paragon stuff to check the wiki article. It compiles all the gamescom and other info from the blues into short bullet list that answers all the questions I’ve seen asked here and on battle.net.

On Row’s example above, that’s correct in general but not in specific, since there are caps on the individual bonuses from sharagon points. You can’t put all 130 points into STR, for instance. Again, see the screenshots for examples on the paragon 2.0 wiki article.

“I still have 2 main questions: 1) When does a new character get access to paragon points (100% of them level 1? Some % coming in every ten levels? 100% at once at max level?) and 2) Is there nothing tied to an individual character anymore?”

The God, in his infinitive wisdom, decides to answer on both of these well-thought questions. 1) All the time 2) No

Desperate as they are to pull themselves out 60/70+Paragons nonsense as they are, but without actually DOING IT, they will take approach which is most easy, and least wanted for a serious player. The God already stated Paragon1.0 was a band-aid, it served its purpose, and now we have Paragon2.0 which is also a band aid.

1. Sharagon gives you a “pool” of points. 2. Individual character has an increasing cap, tied to character level, for how many Sharagon points you can use on it to create the feel of progression for that specific character.

1. Sharagon gives you a “pool” of points. 2. Individual character has an increasing cap, tied to character level, for how many Sharagon points you can use on it to create the feel of progression for that specific character.

Lastly yes paragon levels do not have a cap. The amount of experience required to gain a paragon level increases every time you earn a new one so progress becomes slower the higher you are, but if you theoretically played all day every day for the next 10 years you would still be earning paragon experience.

I think there will be alot of BOE items that will make sure that all characters is not automatically equally strong at max level. Also I hope and think that you will find items that will make you think: “Oh, this item is extremly strong, not just for this build, i have to make a new wizard”

It would be really neat if the different game modes provided different awards, and required different types of builds. One game mode is all about surviving so you’ll have to build really beefy character, and another is about progressing fast where you’ll need a character with high dmg and high mobility.

The #2 point you mention flux is rather invalid. If you’ll want the game to feel fresh (so you could earn those Shareningans again) you just wait for ladder start and there you go, back from level 0 again!

Although they could add some unlockable unique thingy associated with each and every class, i don’t think it’s an absolute necesity.

Well it’s not a necessity; some people didnt’ even want a paragon system in the first place and were happy endlessly grinding at lvl 60. But most players want to feel a sense of progress and at least semi-regular DINGS. Long term in Paragon 2.0 that won’t happen, though as you say, if people choose to be in the ladders then that’ll refresh it every now and then.

You might not want that, though. You might want to have 400 paragon points AND have a newly lvl 70 char who feels like they’re progressing. Sadly, as most of us learn on Xmas and blind dates, wanting does not = having.

Just as a side note to Flux’s second post, If there are caps on stats, how can it be endless? Is there any info on this? Or will it just be that to cap everything would take a literal lifetime? *Like 50 pts in 20 stats would be 1,000 PLs, soo maybe level 999 to 1,000 is like 9 months of grinding lol.

” If there are caps on stats, how can it be endless? Is there any info on this?”

Look at the Paragon 2.0 wiki page, it’s got screens from gamescom showing the caps on half of the bonuses. I assume those caps will increase as you level up in your Paragon, but from what we’ve seen so far you can only add so much to each bonus; 10% to CC, 50% to CD, 150 points to attributes (5 points per Paragon point), etc. So if you had 100 paragon points you’d have to spread them around at least 4 or 5 different fields on each character; not just all 100 into Vitality or IAS, etc.

Presumably a really high Paragon level would result in all of your characters maxing out many/most of the fields, but that would give them a really well-rounded bonus.

There is no point of anything with crap ladders, and those who say “just don play ladders” most of all will, and no one will play “non-ladder”… i cant see any reaseon at all with ladders. Very sad i liked the game until now.

I think I saw someone mentioning you get the sharagon bonuses (mf and gf) on the console at lvl 1, but I’m not even sure if they already have sharagon on the consoles… I just checked a couple rage threads on speedreading mode, so…

Essentially, they’re making a system where “makes sense”:

1) Doing whatever is fun; 2) Playing ladders (since sharagon and economy resets there; 3) Having the highest non-ladder sharagon you can to create chars for the future, future pvp. with all the leftovers from previous ladders.

in my opinion non-ladder players shouldn’t be disadvantaged, i mean, if i don’t want to spend useless time in ladders and i want to have fun with 1, 2 or 3 non-ladder chars then i shall have that. if i create a new pg, when i reach lvl70 i want to be able to instantly get the paragon lvl of my account with all the paragon points. and no, there should not be the need to have different builds per char: the diablo 3 skill system/paragon leveling was developed to experiment different builds with the same char. do you people have nothing to do during the day but play? you can’t just ruin the game experience to others that don’t want to grind all day the same things (like starting from scratch in ladders) for nothing. ;D

I’m not sure I understand this. So there will be ladders connected to the Paragon 2.0 system, that’s okay. When a season ends, I lose all my paragon exp, that’s okay. But is it mandatory for everyone? What if I don’t care about the ladders and climbing a “top score” list and beating others? What I just want to play softcore just like I can right now without losing all the PEXP I worked hard for? That’s still an option?

The best would be to have Ladder PEXP and Acc PEXP. When you get LPEXP that counts towards to your AccPEXP, and when there is a ladder reset you lose all your LPEXP but you still have it as AccPEXP. So can you can keep that PEXP outside the ladder just to level up yourself and add paragoin points to your character. When a new season starts you start to gain LPEXP from level zero again, but every PEXP you get also adds to your AccPEXP. Am I right? Because that’s what I understand from the first blue. If it would work like this, I’m totally going for ladder-play. If the PEXP ladder reset means I lose all the PLevels and everything, don’t count me in.

It does sound as you say, that all paragon xp (and all your characters and all gear I assume) earned in ladder seasons are transfered to your normal non-ladder characters after reset. I’d guess the xp only gets added to the ‘account xp’ after the season ends though.

yes, every time a ladder resets there will be a start from scratch (plvl 0) each time a new ladder will start. however, the paragon experience you gained will be transferred to the non-ladder “sharagon”. i’m not against ladders.. i’m “against” a game system that penalizes the non-ladder players.

Well it's not a necessity; some people didnt' even want a paragon system in the first place and were happy endlessly grinding at lvl 60. But most players want to feel a sense of progress and at least semi-regular DINGS. Long term in Paragon 2.0 that won't happen, though as you say, if people choose to be in the ladders then that'll refresh it every now and then.
You might not want that, though. You might want to have 400 paragon points AND have a newly lvl 70 char who feels like they're progressing. Sadly, as most of us learn on Xmas and blind dates, wanting does not = having.

Why do people keep saying this? The limit is 200 (which you can't even reach without > 10 character slots), the practical limit is 100 (so a single 100 = just about every benefit you'd possibly care about on all characters).
Even if it were 400, it'd take something like 400 level 100s, which isn't even physically possible.

It’s already been confirmed that when you level up, you get 1 point per category. There are 4 categories, each contains 4 stats, each stat can have 50 points.

So at 200, you get 200 points each category and max every stat in every category.

Except that for example one category is “Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence/Vitality”, and you only need 2 of those, therefore at 100 points you’ve gotten all the practical benefits. And same for the other categories – it’s rare you’d actually need more than 2 of the 4 available stats on any given character.

Three out of the four categories (Offensive, Defensive, and Adventure) can be maxed out if you put a total of 200 points into each of those categories. Any excess Paragon levels earned after these categories have been maxed out will still grant a Paragon point, but you will only be able to spend these excess points in the Core Stat category. The Core Stat category will allow you to choose between added Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Vitality.